The Top Five Worst Things About Customer Service Phone Trees

Copyright: Elnur / 123RF Stock Photo

I’m all for automating for efficiency and speed in customer service. But I hate when technology simply doesn’t work the way it is supposed to and leaves me, the customer, feeling like just a gadget on a long assembly line of other gadgets waiting to be processed out of the factory.

Real World Story: I can’t remember the last time I called a company and automatically got a live person to answer my call. Yes, phone trees are ubiquitous across all industries and in all sizes of companies. And so, I’ve encountered efficient and speedy phone trees, but many many dismal ones.

Strategies that Turn it Around:

1. Your call is important to us. I cringe at calling a company and hearing the dreaded recording that I am a valuable customer and that my call is important, and so my wait time is going to be more than 45 minutes! If your company suffers from this, upgrade your telephone tree system to offer customers a call back instead of having them wait on the phone for long periods of time.
2. Enter 1 for new service, 2 for billing, 3 for technical support. Have you ever called a company and the one option that you needed was not on the long menu of options? Were you angered that no “dial zero for the operator” was available either and after repeated attempts at hitting zero anyway, you were immediately disconnected? This is infuriating! An effective phone tree allows customers to hit zero for an operator when the menu option they need is not available.
3. Please enter your account information. Nothing irks me more than having to enter my account information into a phone tree only to have to repeat the same information to a live person once my call is answered. What was the point of me entering the information in the first place? If your system does not automatically auto-populate information on a service agent’s screen, then do not ask customers to enter information into your phone tree. Doing so is futile and it angers customers.
4. The information you entered cannot be verified. It’s bad enough I can’t automatically talk to a live person. And now my account information cannot be verified by the “system”? And in most cases, this leads to being disconnected from the call. If an account cannot be verified by the system, it is then best that the call be re-routed automatically to an operator.
5. Retelling my story. Great customer service means that customers should tell their story only once. If you transfer customers, simply fill-in the person you are transferring to what the problem is. Don’t make customers repeat themselves again and again. It is a waste of their time.

Remember: Customers want to feel truly appreciated and important. They have problems that need fixing, and they don’t want to repeat themselves or put in extra effort simply to get to the right department or the right person. Great customer service is about helping people efficiently and quickly. BAD customer service is about wasting people’s time and angering them. What does your phone tree say about your customer service?

Do you get many complaints about your company’s customer service phone tree? Please share your comments and stories.